Critique Of Violence Research Articles

Just Police Violence: Liberal ideology and the critique of violence from Walter Benjamin to Black Lives Matter

Abstract Policing is broadly legitimate – even while imperfect and in need of reform. This axiom of liberal political theory and practice is shaken by movements like Black Lives Matter, which confront and expose carceral violence as the routine, deadly edge of racial capitalism. Thinking with abolitionist currents within these movements, this paper engages critical theory to unpick the ideological discourses that legitimise police violence in ‘real existing liberalism’. I argue that justifications of policing replicate the ‘analytic atomism’ and mythologisation of law that Neu’s Just Liberal Violence identifies in defences of sweatshops, torture, and war. I bring together Benjamin’s classic excavation of sovereign power in the policing function with the experiences of today’s policed subjects to reveal the limitations of liberal appeals to ‘the rule of law’. The standard figuration of oppressive violence as exceptional, deviant, and unlawful, I argue, serves to legitimise the institutions in and through which that violence is normalised.

Affirming educative violence: Walter Benjamin on divine violence and schooling

ABSTRACT In his ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of ‘educative violence’ as a contemporary manifestation of ‘divine violence’. In this paper, we aim to interpret ‘educative violence’ by examining other instances where the young Benjamin addresses pedagogical issues. By connecting the concept of divine violence to Benjamin’s ideas of education in tradition and of the schooling of Geist, our goal is twofold: firstly, to comprehend the productive role that violence may play in the pedagogical context, and secondly, to apply it to the conception of schooling presented by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons to highlight its relevance to school education. By linking scholastic violence to divine violence, we argue that schools must be defended not despite but because of the violence they inhere. In doing so, we contribute another layer to the defense of the school and offer fresh insights into Benjamin’s notion of divine violence.

Albanian Poetry Emerging from the Aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo War: Memory, Trauma, Revolt

This article explores the memory of war, trauma, and revolt in Albanian poetry emerging from the aftermath of the 1998–99 Kosovo War. It focuses on constructing Kosovo Albanian post-war poetry and asks about the avenues of literary representation of war. It examines the work of Xhevdet Bajraj, Arben Idrizi and Halil Matoshi, focusing on the subjects’ positions – exile and national victimhood in the case of Bajraj; critique of violence in the case of Idrizi; disillusion and trauma in the case of Matoshi. The article also finds that Kosovo's post-war literature stands in a broader framework of the literature from ex- Yugoslav republics, providing a geographical and cultural background to war poetry. The view and interpretation of the literary response to the Kosovo War aims to highlight poetry that keeps memory about the war alive, as well and explores the impact of war, to protest against violence and domination.

Crime and Policing in Africa: Tactical Politics, Authoritarianism, and the Rule of Law

In 2020, Nigerian youths took to the streets to demand the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit of the Nigerian Police with a long history of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, extortion, torture, and other atrocities. The Nigerian government created the division in 1992 following the killing of an army colonel, under the pretense of fighting a crime wave which was sweeping the country. In the “societies of enmity” (Achille Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity” [Radical Philosophy Vol. 200, No. 1], 23–25) we live in today, the growing militarization of law enforcement in the context of the “war on crime” has put even solid democracies in grave danger and continues to justify authoritarianism and military regimes worldwide. The expansion of state powers through the violent exploitation of its growing “margins,” (V. Das and D. Poole, eds., Anthropology at the Margins of the State [School of American Research Press, 2004]) tarnished with the signs of danger, illegality, and precariousness, has shown that bureaucratic power and state violence walk hand in hand in instituting highly unequal but economically viable social orders in postcolonial Africa and elsewhere. Those movements configure an emergent threat coming from a tactical level of political action and show that contemporary political power can indeed emerge from the tip of a machine gun, proving Walter Benjamin’s critique of Hannah Arendt’s famous image (“Critique of Violence” in Deconstruction, a Reader [Routledge, 2017], 62–70).

UNPACKING WALTER BENJAMIN’S SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE AND WAR

Conflict, violence and, ultimately, war are central to Walter Benjamin’s sociology of language. Using biblical language, his earlies work shows that after the fall of man, language becomes a vessel to be filled by the usurper, a tool, he uses that bends others to his will, as Satan does in Paradise Lost. Benjamin’s study of German Trauspiels, mourning plays similar to Hamlet and Richard III, leads him to posit that the law and constitutional structures in the Baroque period are of single importance in understanding the role of conflict and violence. In “Towards a Critique of Violence,” Benjamin makes two key arguments. The first is that a workers’ general strike” is a legitimate form of violence and that the state’s response, often military, is not. The second is that the Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is misunderstood because it does not contain a penalty and, secondly, it cannot be a blanket injunction; Jewish law, he notes, allowed for self-defence. His best-known works, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” are written after his turn to Marxism associated with the Frankfurt School. In the first, in addition to showing how mechanical reproduction destroys the “aura” of art, he is concerned with how Fascist art, such a Leni Riefenstahl’s films glorifying Hitler. These performances are designed to “absorb” or overawe viewers, making them quiescent, silent participants in the power play that leads to conflict and, ultimately war. Using quasi-religious language, the Theses deconstruct “historicism,” showing how Rankian history sides with the victors, the Great Men and Women of History at the expense of the ruled. He argues that each generation can redeem the past by “brushing history against the grain” and using discontinuities to show the violence and conflict that historicists seek to hide.

Critique of Ontological Militarism

Abstract War metaphors permeate the world we live in. From wildlife documentaries (natural war) to the curbing of academic freedom (war on woke), it seems that anything can be described in an essential likeness to warfare. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this paper investigates the ubiquity of war metaphors in critiques of violence within Critical Security Studies and International Political Sociology. The analysis focuses on three concepts recently advanced as alternatives to the shortcomings of securitization theory and its reliance on a mythological idea of liberal peace: fighting, martial politics, and struggles. The paper investigates how each of these concepts is built in relation to war metaphors and explains this as revealing of an underlying symptom, a form of ontological militarism, which these alternatives to securitization cannot properly work through. It advances the concept of ontological militarism as the attribution of heuristic privilege to war turning it into the cypher of all social relations by investment in an assumed indistinction between war/peace and war/struggle. The paper invites critiques of liberal civility in International Relations (IR) to take seriously the point whereby the resort to war metaphors becomes the symptom of an inability to escape the symbolic horizons of a violent militaristic order.

SHILPA GUPTA: AN ARTIST CONCEPTUALIZING WITH TECHNOLOGY

India follows the catchy, trendy, uncertain, and spontaneous concepts of new media art for the last few decades. New media practice in India has dealt with issues of identity, critiques of violence, narrative, and performance, and other subjects that come under the umbrella of new issues. New media art began to appear in India since the inception of the 21st century, but it showed in the works of artists like Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malam, Ved Nayar, Rummana Hussain in the 1990s. New media ideologically mixed art with scientific craft, which resulted in an amplified narrative of our country and world that is a union of different creative languages. New media create a futuristic ethos in the art that is developing every second. It is a medium that symbolizes freedom of mediums, as it is spontaneous and enough. In all this, Shilpa Gupta came as a ‘blind star and star blind’.Shilpa Gupta is one of the leading contemporary, influential, and critically acclaimed new media artists of India’s new generation of international artists. A transcultural artist even when influenced with regional specificity. She considers new media art (a web of technology) as a key part of today’s existence, and, ensuing, prefers various forms of cutting-edge technology as the vehicle for her interactions with the viewer. Although Gupta’s works are developed largely through technological means their significance lies in their candid communication, the various issues that shape contemporary life, particularly the lives of young and adults. Her work is often coded with meanings that are not always instantly available but require the efforts of the viewer. Uniquely and humorously, Gupta reminds us of the danger of taking for granted – that it is indeed technology that connects us to the world. She is an artist who deals with her viewers, her audience is 70 percent part of her artwork. She brings reality from a new perspective.

Benjamin ainda faz sentido: Fórum sobre a atualidade da “Crítica da Violência” de Benjamin em seu centenário, Introdução - Por que precisamos de Benjamin mais do que nunca

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In this opening to the Forum, the guest editors Gabriela Azevedo and Ludmila Franca-Lipke introduce the Forum as a whole. Then in the following piece, James Martel argues that Benjamin helps us to better understand our current moment than almost any other thinker. Benjamin explains the nature of authoritarianism, the link between liberalism (and neoliberalism) and fascism and how such forces can be resisted. In his essay, Martel updates the concept of mythic violence to take into account the resilience of the liberal/fascist connection (even as it appears to be a node of struggle and mutual incompatibility). He shows that ‘Critique of Violence’ doesn’t just diagnose our time but it also shows a way out of the abyss that we are in. Martel lists seven key points from Benjamin’s essay and adds one other point from José Carlos Mariátegui to think concretely about how to apply their lessons from 100 years ago to our own time.

Lembranças Coloniais, Restos Coloniais: Fórum sobre a Atualidade da ‘Crítica da Violência’ de Benjamin em seu Centenário, Parte II

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part II of the Forum, Aggie Hirst, Tom Houseman, and Vinícius Armele draw on Benjamin to analyse what remains of European colonialism. Hirst and Houseman interrogate the extent to which Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence may be useful in the service of decolonial struggle. Insofar as it is antithetical to the colonial order – which is inaugurated and reproduced by the law making and law preserving functions of mythic violence – divine violence appears to open a space for conceptualising a far-reaching challenge to the violence encrypted in that order that is ‘lethal without spilling blood’. Because the exercise of such ‘power over all life’ is exercised ‘for the sake of living,’ Benjamin argues, its accompanying sacrifices are acceptable. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory, Hirst and Houseman offer a critique of the ‘God’s-eye view’ inherent to any claim to divine violence. Benjamin’s text can generate powerful insights into the nature and limits of decolonial struggles, but it ultimately fails in providing an alternative to the mythic violence it criticises, by reproducing – at the heart of the emancipatory concept of divine violence – a problematic impersonation of a divine authorial voice that is already a trope of coloniality. Armele’s reflection seeks to recover ancient tragedy’s role of reluctance toward the previously unquestionable power of the violence of mythical destiny. Resume Benjamin’s contributions on (1) melancholy and Romanticism, which represents the revolt of repressed, channelled and deformed subjectivity and affectivity, and (2) the criticism of the violence that is established in the manifestation of its ethical relations between law [Recht] and justice [Gerechtigkeit], Armele reveals the intertwining of the experience of historical time and the orientation of current political struggles. Inspired by Benjamin, he examines the action of the Black Lives Matters movement in Bristol, UK, which toppled a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, and threw it in the city’s harbour, reopening a historical wound of colonialism and national memory.

Reflexões sobre a Violência Divina: Fórum sobre a Atualidade da ‘Crítica da Violência’ de Benjamin em seu Centenário, Parte III

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. Melany Cruz, Kaveh Ghoreishi and Sara Minelli engage Benjamin on ‘divine violence.’ As Cruz notes, lynching in contemporary Mexico has become a recurrent phenomenon in nota roja outlets. Due to its brutality, perceptions of lynching have been reduced to a form of uncivilised and irrational crime. In opposition to this perspective, Cruz theorises the political dimension of the violence of lynching by drawing from Benjamin and argues that such violence symbolically and affectively dramatises the suspension of ‘mere life’ in which the communities enacting the lynchings are immersed in the current conditions of neoliberal Mexico. In this way, it is possible to claim that lynching, in Benjamin’s terms, constitutes a form of divine violence that has the capacity to reveal and communicate the need to end the fear- and anger-provoking condition of ‘mere life.’ In the second section, Ghoreishi and Minelli propose a reading of ‘divine’ as opposed to ‘mythical violence’ that brings out the radical elements of some contemporary struggles by interpreting some examples of strike which took place in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhilat) in the last forty years. They understand the revolutionary ‘general strike’ considered by Benjamin as what Jesi has called a ‘suspension of time,’ bringing ‘normal’ economic and social relations to a halt. In this sense, the general strikes in Kurdistan can be said to bring the mythological temporality of oppression to an end. These struggles, in which new forms of collectivity have emerged and been experimented, should, therefore, be seen as anticipations of the ‘divine violence’ that puts an end to ‘mythical violence.’

Violência/poder/força e luta contra o tempo no Brasil contemporâneo: Fórum sobre a atualidade da “Crítica da Violência” de Benjamin em seu centenário, Parte V

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part V of the Forum, Rafael Barros Vieira argues that Benjamin’s essay ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (Critique of Violence/Power/Force) is deeply penetrated by the historical problems of the revolution and counterrevolution in Germany. In a certain sense, it is a conjunctural text, although it goes beyond its own context by seeking to apprehend historical phenomena of longue durée. Unfortunately, Vieira argues, this contextual aspect tends to disappear in readings that emphasize only a kind of philosophical ‘purity’ of this essay. Vieira hypothesizes that the essay, in addition to facing conjunctural problems, can be used to understand other conjunctures by highlighting the relations between law, history and social classes (in a wide conception of social classes that will be present in Benjamin’s work and will be made explicit in his late writings). The purpose of turning to this essay is to critically understand the exercise of violence/power/force in liberal states, particularly that of Brazil, highlighting the movement through which the authoritarian and fascist forces rise around liberal state structures. As Benjamin points out in one of the variants of the essay on the work of art, fascism is the conservation of relations of production and property through violence. However, violence is not a product only of this type of regime, although it certainly radicalizes it. Vieira proposes to understand how this is expressed in this recent period of Brazil, marked by the combination of the rise of a president with fascist traits, the reorganization of certain liberal institutions and the implementation of typically neoliberal reforms.

Biopoder: Fórum sobre a atualidade da “Crítica da Violência” de Benjamin em seu centenário, Parte IV

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In their separate contributions, sasha skaidra and R. Guy Emerson each elaborate on how Benjamin’s classic illuminates contemporary understandings of the politics of life and (violent) death globally. skaidra takes the Sanctuary City movement in Europe and North America as a focus. Arguing that Sanctuary politics is limited in its capacity to challenge borders in-of-themselves because the movement is caught in a false antinomy between natural and positive law that Benjamin critiques, skaidra’s contribution proposes a critique of borders that emulates Benjamin’s method which isolates violence from the mystification of legal theory. Whereas migrant justice movements threaten the state order by challenging Westphalian notions of time, Sanctuary operates like a purgatory wherein a potential messianic migrant figure could herald the end of state borders. skaidra proposes the idea of utopic purgatory as a means to isolate how Sanctuary Cities contribute to and limit a critique of borders. In the second sole-authored contribution to this section of the forum, Emerson rereads Benjamin in relation to Foucault by thinking biopower through criteria irreducible to official qualifications on life or the efficient management of populations. As a pure means without ends, violence for Benjamin cannot confirm anything external to it, be it the protection of life that comes after its elimination elsewhere or the regulation of life that follows the suppression of alterity. Instead, for Emerson, violent biopower, as pure, manifests a deadly order that immediately strikes life in a manner too abrupt to confirm rule or regulate populations. The result is a criterion for understanding both violence and life in biopower that maintains its distance from official intentions.

Mito e autoridade: Fórum sobre a atualidade da “Crítica da Violência” de Benjamin em seu centenário, Parte I - A autoridade mítica da fundação: para uma crítica da justiça

Abstract This essay proposes an interpretation of the relationship between law, violence, and justice based on Walter Benjamin’s work ‘Critique of Violence.’ I argue that, in the essay, the three terms are sustained by an underlying notion of authority, which, according to Benjamin, has a mythical character. This is shown by an interpretation of how law’s authority is linked to its mythical foundation. Then, by analysing Western mythology and how the notion of authority in our tradition is linked to the Roman figures of Romulus and Numa, I propose a new interpretation of the relationship between law and myth in Benjamin’s text, showing how law also depends on a mythical justice and how the critique of violence must also involve a critique of justice. I end the paper by tracing a parallel between Benjamin’s divine violence and what could be termed divine justice.

Benjamin e o Brasil, uma interpretação final: Fórum sobre a atualidade da “Crítica da Violência” de Benjamin em seu centenário, Parte VI

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay ‘Critique of Violence’/‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part VI of the Forum, Bethânia Assy, Rafael Felgueiras Rolo, and Jeanne Marie Gagnebin close the series with reflections on Benjamin and Brazil. In their essay, Assy and Rolo discuss Benjamin’s work to assert which conception of history could render justice to actual needs in the struggle against contemporary forms of fascism, especially considering the reality of the urban movements such as MUST and MTST. For Rolo and Assy, the concept of divine violence needs to be reconsidered and dislocated from traditional understandings in contemporary literature on Benjamin, and the authors do so by developing an immanent notion of divine violence. They develop an analysis of Benjamin’s eighth thesis to make sense of the so-called ‘state of exception’ regarding a real state of exception, which is the duty of critical thinking to instate. Assy and Rolo shed light on the social phenomenon of these urban occupations, so that a better positioning in the struggle against contemporary fascism is (if at all) possible in the light of Benjamin’s texts. In the final reflection, Gagnebin draws on her vast expertise in contemporary philosophy to weave together conceptual and philological insights on Benjamin’s Marxism in relation to his political and theological thought, on law and justice, and on myth and the mythical.

The Inversions of Walter Benjamin’s Anarchism

Walter Benjamin’s ambivalent engagement with anarchist thought extends beyond well-known works from the early 1920s such as “Critique of Violence” (1921). Contemporary anarchist thinkers, including Gustav Landauer and Georges Sorel, influenced Benjamin and many of his associates, including Ernst Bloch, Erich Unger, Hugo Ball, and Gershom Scholem. This article describes the place of anarchism in Benjamin’s work, particularly in the fragment “World and Time” (1919) and in the essay on surrealism (1929), as a rhetorical double inversion, in which two reversals reconceptualize anarchist thought to yield original insights on questions of political agency, aesthetics, and tradition.

Toward a Critique of (Police) Violence

In Walter Benjamin’s pivotal essay “Toward the Critique of Violence,” the state emerges as an originary site of violence, and the police figure as a key institution that makes possible both law-preserving and law-founding violence. I argue that Benjamin offers a unique and clarifying understanding of violence that can help make sense of twenty-first century calls for police and prison abolition. At the same time, Benjamin critiques several leftist attempts to combat state violence—such as the workplace strike and leftist reformism—finding in them a reformulation of the very violence they seek to combat. I argue that many of these critiques could be equally levied at some manifestations of the contemporary abolitionist movement. This paper concludes by distilling some of Benjamin’s insights about the propensity to reflect the violence we attempt to contest into some lessons for contemporary activism and social movements.

Violence, Education, and the Tradition of the Oppressed in Benjamin and Du Bois

This paper discusses two thinkers who locate the possibility of revolutionary historical change in political projects oriented toward the formation of subjects and cultivation of sensibility. I begin by considering the relationship between historical violence and education in the works of Walter Benjamin. After introducing the provocative association of education with divine violence found in “Toward the Critique of Violence,” I expand on Benjamin’s conception of pedagogical force. Highlighting the centrality of education in Benjamin’s early work, I argue that his account of learning does not depend on the mastery of students by teachers, nor more generally on the mastery of objective reality by a sovereign subject, but on the mastery of the educational relationship by tradition. Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s discussion of the abolition of slavery, I close by describing the revolutionary cultivation of sensibility as a dynamic and collectively achieved mode of historical learning.

A Violence Other than Violence

This article looks at several attempts to conceptualize a legitimate use of revolutionary violence in the anti-authoritarian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The central problem confronting the repertoire of action in this period lay in understanding how a violence deployed to fight power could avoid reproducing instances of this same power. Some, like Guy Debord, proposed a framework in which the revolutionary subject employs violence without becoming subject to such violence itself. Others, like Antonio Negri, sought to distinguish among various regimes of violence, arguing that true state violence was modally distinct from revolutionary violence, or the concrete materialization of a proletarian potentiality. Although opposed, both of these perspectives strive to mitigate or restrain the brutal subjectivation attending the exercise of violence. Placing this debate against the background of Walter Benjamin's claim, in his “Critique of Violence,” that a “divine violence” that would neither sustain nor uphold law is “undisclosed to human beings,” this article argues that the Autonomia movement in 1970s Italy reveals how such undisclosedness, such invisibility, becomes incarnated in a social form. If it is only by abandoning a concept of sovereign victory that a form of divine violence can appear, this is because its appearance coincides with the destitution of the cohesion of the social body upholding state sovereignty. Revolutionary violence is not nonviolence but, rather, a violence other than violence, a form of power whose content is a subjectivation beyond the problematic of sovereignty.

Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence

This article addresses the history of police violence and extra-legal killings of Black people and argues that social contract theory plays an ideological role to legitimate the coercive power of the state over the African-American community. The article first looks at the alarming numbers of Black Americans killed in the United States over the past few decades and compares police violence to the extra-legal lynchings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, his classic 1921 essay, the article then describes the obfuscation of an underlying truth: that, far from being a neutral arbiter between its citizens, the state is the primary inscription of violence in the body politic. The police are the face of that state, both in its law-making violence (die rechtsetzende Gewalt) and law-preserving violence (die rechtserhaltende Gewalt). In contrast to the mythology of a social contract in which all members are treated equally before the law, the state targets African-Americans to legitimate its monopoly on violence, thereby unmasking the social contract as a racial contract, which has excluded Black people from the country’s very inception. The power of the state rests in part on the psychology of police officers who see themselves as its very embodiment and believe that any resistance to their authority is both a personal and symbolic challenge to their monopoly on violence. Yet, the article dissents from the view of many who believe that the country may transcend its history of institutional racism and violence and restore the promise of the social contract. The article concludes that, despite the hopes of modern liberalism, Benjamin’s theory leads to the conclusion that there is little possibility for either the redemption of the social contract or the rehabilitation of the state.

Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, Walter Benjamin, Peter Fenves (ed.) and Julia Ng (ed.) (2021)

Review of: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, Walter Benjamin, Peter Fenves (ed.) and Julia Ng (ed.) (2021) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 368 pp., ISBN 978-0-80474-952-7, h/bk, $25.00